There have been many approaches to solving the routing problem for mobile ad hoc networks. In
existing approaches, routing information is disseminated at the network-scale level to maintain
routing connectivity, which leads to the scalability problem as the network size increases. In this
thesis, we present an innovative, self-organised routing infrastructure called EARA (Emergent Ad
hoc Routing Algorithm), inspired by the foraging behaviour of ant colonies, for mobile ad hoc
networks. This routing scheme uses the self-organising mechanisms of positive/negative feedback
and random fluctuations to reinforce good quality paths by means of local interaction, without
using global network-scale message dissemination. We demonstrate that the proposed routing
scheme improves algorithm scalability. Moreover, optimisations employing aspects of the crosslayer
design and service-classification based queuing strategy are also investigated in order to
address the congestion control and Quality-of-Service provisioning. The thesis presents not only
the design of the swarm-based routing algorithms, but also the empirical analysis of performance
of the proposed algorithms under a variety of scenarios using simulations.